Private Conflict and Policy Passage: Interest-Group Conflict and State Medical Malpractice Reform

James Madison argued in Federalist 10 that "rival political factions" work against the public good. In contrast to Madison's pessimistic account, I suggest that factional conflict can lead to more representative public policy, and thus further the will of the people. I theorize that elected officials often seek a safe political position—one that corresponds to the preferences of the public at large—during periods of high conflict. I assess this theory in one, salient policy area, medical malpractice. I measure conflict with contributions for state candidates given by (i) the health and insurance industries, which generally support malpractice laws, and (ii) lawyers, who frequently oppose the laws. I find that group conflict matters to policy outcomes. I also find evidence that, under conditions of elevated conflict, adopted policies are more likely to move toward the general ideological preferences of the public at large. These results suggest that group conflict affects both the quantity and character of policy in the American states.     

Explaining State Budget Punctuations: Policy Transparency,Political Institutions,and Electoral Incentives

What factors cause policies experiencing long periods of stability to be interrupted occationally by a short period of large changes? This study argues that electoral incentives might influence the search, supply, and processing of information on constituency issues, as well as the associated cognitive or institutional frictions, and thus determine the presence and variation of punctuated policies. This article develops and evaluates this claim within a systemic framework consisting of policy transparency, political institutions, and electoral incentives. For the purpose of identifying policy punctuations, this research uses the Generalized Pareto Distribution in the Extreme Value Theory. This study analyzes budget spending data collected from FY 1988 to FY 2008 for all 50 American states. This study finds that greater policy transparency is associated with larger spending stability. By contrast, greater gubernatorial competition is more likely to produce extreme spending changes. Electoral incentives shaped by public preference and political term limits have a profound impact on nonincremental policy changes. The impact of policy transparency is conditional on public preference, while that of electoral competition and legislative professionalism is moderated by political term limits. Particularly, a transparent policy consistent with public preference and legislative professionalism with term limits are more likely to give rise to punctuated policies, while gubernatorial (legislative) competition leads to less punctuated changes when governors (legislators) are subject to term limits.     

Who governs culture? Actors,federalism and expertise in Swiss regional cultural policy

ABSTRACT

This article proposes a novel approach to cultural policies and cultural policy change, drawing on public policy and institutional analysis to study how decision-making power is distributed between actors in the public and private sectors and at different state levels, as well as the precise roles of public administrations, elected officials and cultural actors. Indeed, rather than directly defining cultural policy, laws on culture mostly designate actors in charge of policy implementation. Based on an empirical application of this analytical framework to the case of Swiss cantons and focusing specifically on the positions of cultural actors, findings show that cultural policies are transformed in different ways, affording more or less power to actors from the cultural sector in implementation arrangements generally dominated by administrative actors.     

Anti‐Immigrant Sentiment and the Adoption of State Immigration Policy

Over the last two decades, the American states have become increasingly active in shaping U.S. immigration policies. One consistent predictor in studies of state immigration policies revolves around public opinion or mass political attitudes in the form of anti‐immigrant sentiment. Unfortunately, past research relies extensively on blunt demographic proxies or other alternative replacements to measure mass opinion. Through incorporating a direct measure of anti‐immigrant sentiment constructed from public opinion surveys, we uncover mixed results. In static models, anti‐immigrant sentiment predicts a state’s overall immigration policy restrictiveness or policy “tone”; however, mass opinion fails to consistently predict immigration restrictiveness in more dynamic models of annual policy change and total number of hostile policies. We theorize that state legislators are likely responding to mass opinion with immigration policy restrictiveness when citizens mobilize and demand accountability during times of heightened issue salience. However, during times of reduced salience among the populace the influence of anti‐immigrant sentiment wanes, and commercial and political elites are seemingly able to shift individual immigration policies in more accommodative directions. Anti‐immigrant sentiment can motivate state immigration policy restriction, but likely only during select periods of heightened issue salience and attentive, engaged citizenry.     

Traceable Tasks and Complex Policies: When Politics Matter for Policy Implementation

Implementation represents a key venue for the expression of political conflict. The challenge of illusory implementation, implementing the law's letter but not its spirit, has long vexed scholars and architects of public policy. We develop a political model of policy implementation to predict the kinds of politics—electoral, group, administrative—that different parts of complicated laws activate during implementation. Using original state‐level data on landmark education policy, we assess whether and how these politics render illusory implementation more or less likely for specific policy tasks embedded in complex laws. Consistent with our model, we find electoral politics render illusory implementation less likely for a narrow set of tasks. Group‐based politics and administrative politics bear on illusory implementation for a broader set of tasks in diverse ways. Overall, how policy activates politics during implementation depends on the features of the policy lever, where it is put into practice, and how traceable it is to the bureaucrats who do the implementing. Further, the results underscore how nuanced insights about implementation emerge when one considers individual components of complex laws, rather than treating the laws themselves whole cloth.     

The construction of a "population problem" in colonial India, 1919-1947

This article examines the construction of a "population problem" among public health officials in India during the inter-war period. British colonial officials came to focus on India's population through their concern with high Indian infant and maternal mortality rates. They raised the problem of population as one way in which to highlight the importance of dealing with public health at an all-India basis, in a context of constitutional devolution of power to Indians where they feared such matters would be relegated to relative local unimportance. While they failed to significantly shape government policy, their arguments in support of India's 'population problem' nevertheless found a receptive audience in the colonial public sphere among Indian intellectuals, economists, eugenicists, women social reformers and birth controllers. The article contributes to the history of population control by situating its pre-history in British colonial public health and development policy and outside the logic of USA's Cold War strategic planning for Asia.     

Learning from Schools: School Choice,Political Learning,and Policy Feedback

This article investigates the policy feedback and political learning effects of school vouchers. Of particular interest is how market‐based policies affect the likelihood that program participants will connect their experiences with the policy to the government. I examine parent survey data from an evaluation of the Milwaukee school voucher program. I find that voucher parents are more likely than public school parents to perceive that the government has influenced their child's schooling and to believe that their experiences with their child's school have taught them about how government works. Further, voucher parents report that their experiences with the policy have made them more politically active. While majorities of voucher and public school parents support increased public school expenditures, there is some evidence that school vouchers may decrease support for public schools.     

Regional Innovation Policy and Innovative Behaviour: Looking for Additional Effects

This paper aims to evaluate the additionality of innovation policy in terms of innovative behaviours at the regional level. Innovative behaviours are identified both within and across firm and regional boundaries. The role of policy is evaluated for a sample of firms in the Italian region of Emilia–Romagna (ER), exploiting an original, survey-based data set. Propensity score matching is applied to investigate the effects of an innovation subsidy. Funded firms are found to be more likely to upgrade their competencies, compared with similar non-subsidized firms. On the other hand, in most cases, innovation cooperation with other business partners within or outside the region is not significantly affected by policy. Ultimately, the investigated innovation policy in the ER region seems to show what might be termed “cognitive capacity additionality”, rather than “network additionality”.     

Go East,Young Cadre: Experiments in Inter‐Provincial Training of Party and State Managers in China

This article situates China's local policy experimentation in the broader context of policy experiments in decentralized political systems, through a case study which represents a local state response to China's transition to a market economy. With growing regional and urban–rural inequalities evident after the initial reform period (1978–1994), local party leaders of inland provinces devised strategies for addressing these inequalities and encouraging public–private sector mobility among party officials. County and township‐level leaders pursued local policy experiments in which they selected and sent officials to find private‐sector work in China's booming coastal cities. Initiated in the 1990s and peaking in the 2000s, these policy experiments and inter‐provincial transfers demonstrate the discretion that local officials possess to conduct programmatic/policy experiments in a unitary political system and show how officials resort to extra‐institutional strategies in order to bridge perceived knowledge gaps. The ultimate demise of these programmes illuminates the challenges to extra‐institutional policy innovations in transitioning states.     

Scientific Uncertainties, Public Policy, and Global Warming

Whether the uncertainties (about global warming) are large enough to suggest delaying policy responses is not a scientific question per se, but a value judgment… [T]he public and government officials need to know which uncertainties are reducible, which may not be reducible, and how long it may take to narrow the reducible uncertainties. (Schneider, 1989a)     

Play Nice or Pick a Fight? Cooperation as an Interest Group Strategy at Implementation

The open, multilevel nature of U.S. policymaking enables interest group activity throughout the policy process. At policy implementation, groups attempt to secure benefits or ameliorate legislated effects by devising cooperative or conflictual strategies to influence outcomes, especially when agency officials have discretion to design rules and negotiate agreements. Investigating group “street‐level” activity with respect to the Endangered Species Act, this research finds that policy context and resources shape the degree of information and access available to groups, which influences the strategies groups adopt. Groups with access and specialized information will attempt to change or influence policy outcomes cooperatively. Groups with limited technical information are more likely to fight implementation.     

Policy Entrepreneurs,Legislators, and Agenda Setting: Information and Influence

Policy entrepreneurs are thought to be instrumental in agenda change, yet we lack knowledge of how legislators perceive their role in the agenda formation process. Using data from a national survey of state legislators, we examine whether entrepreneurs shape the legislative agenda on disaster preparedness and relief, which types of entrepreneurs are most influential, and what strategies they use in their interactions with legislators. The results indicate that legislators who report contact with policy entrepreneurs are more likely to have introduced related legislation, evidence of the important link between entrepreneurs and policy change. While entrepreneurs utilize a variety of different strategies, the analysis reveals policymakers are particularly receptive to entrepreneurs who provide new and reliable information. This finding suggests the influence of entrepreneurs lies not only in their ability to define problems and build coalitions, but also in their distinctive ability to provide information to elected officials, an important role that has largely been overlooked by existing literature.     

Trans-Subsystem Dynamics: Policy Topography, Mass Opinion, and Policy Change

We argue that the treatment of trans-subsystem change, and particularly the role of public opinion in fostering such change, within the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) has been underspecified. We propose a model of "policy topography" that combines the concepts of public opinion, clusters of linked subsystems, and policy issue venues. While the ACF has characterized subsystems as relatively self-contained, we argue that they are more usefully understood as operating in a relatively permeable fashion among evolving clusters of subsystems linked together by networked relations, strategically overlapping policy considerations, and public opinion disruptions. The "policy topography" model offers opportunities to assess the relationships across policy subsystems, and to better specify the critical relationship between public policy and mass opinions. We offer examples, and suggest hypotheses along with avenues for appropriate empirical analysis.     

The Effects of Beneficiary Targeting on Public Support for Social Policies

We assess the tendency for the public to use group‐centric policy evaluations with evidence from a survey experiment concerning two issues within the social policy domain, health care and aid to cities. By randomly varying target group identity within each issue and using both negatively and positively regarded groups our evidence shows that differences exist in the tendency for members of the public to use group‐centric heuristics. Group‐centric evaluations are related to party identification and political ideology. Across both issues conservatives and Republicans are more likely than liberals or Democrats to adopt a group‐centric heuristic. Partisan and ideological differences suggest that established theories miss the mark by emphasizing how universal policy designs are preferred to designs that target unpopular groups.     

Cities are Alive with the Sound of Music: Saengerfest and the Transformation of Urban Public Music in Nineteenth-century America

This article examines the development of outdoor public music in American cities during the nineteenth century and develops three primary arguments. Organized and recreational forms of public music – such as musical festivals and outdoor band concerts – became commonplace and integral to city life during the second half of the nineteenth century. Second, German-American singing festivals (Saengerfests) were major public events during the mid-nineteenth century and helped create this recreational public music culture by demonstrating how organized and recreational public music could enhance city life and suggesting to commentators and public officials that it could serve as a tool of reform. Third, public music – such as occurred during Saengerfests – helped bridge social divisions and made American cities more socially fluid, even at a time when some aspects of civic life were becoming more divided and contentious.     

The Role of Universities in Regional Development: Conceptual Models and Policy Institutions in the UK,Sweden and Austria

The literature on universities’ contributions to regional development is broad and diverse. A precise understanding of how regions may draw advantages from various university activities and the role of public policy institutions in promoting such activities is still missing. The aim of this paper is to provide a framework for analysing universities’ contributions to regional economic and societal development in differing national contexts and the policy institutions that underpin them. To do this, we review four conceptual models: the entrepreneurial university model, the regional innovation system (RIS) model, the mode 2 university model and the engaged university model. The paper demonstrates that these four models emphasize very different activities and outputs by which universities are seen to benefit regional economy and society. It is also shown that these models differ markedly with respect to the policy implications and practice. Analysing some of the public policy imperatives and incentives in the UK, Austria and Sweden, the paper highlights that in the UK, policies encourage all four university models. In contrast, in Sweden and Austria, policy institutions tend to privilege the RIS university model, whilst at the same time, there is some evidence for increasing support of the entrepreneurial university model.     

The Role of Public Input in State Welfare Policymaking

This article reports findings from a survey of 257 state officials involved in public assistance policymaking in the American states during the early to mid-1990s. Respondents were asked to comment on the impetus for welfare reform, on methods employed to gauge public preferences, and on sources of policy ideas. These officials, including state legislators, social service agency directors, and senior advisors to governors, revealed a variety of forums for gathering public input. Although few respondents affiliated with elective office reported significant direct electoral challenges on welfare issues, they often cited constituent contacts regarding welfare reform.     

Inside or Outside? The Politics of Family and Medical Leave

The efforts of interest groups to pass family and medical leave policies are illustrative of a dilemma confronting advocates of policy innovation. Faced with strong opposition from business lobbies and in many cases reluctant legislatures and veto-wielding executives, proponents of family and medical leave had to balance their desire to pass the policy they wanted against their desire to pass a policy. This study examines the family and medical leave policy process at the federal level and in three illustrative states. The study finds that coalitions of "insiders" are more likely to get family and medical leave policies enacted both because they have more political clout and because they are more likely to propose moderate bills and to be willing to compromise. However, the policies enacted by the insider coalitions generally cover barely half the population and are unpaid. This lends credibility to the arguments of members of "outsider" groups that there is a value in proposing more wide-ranging policies.     

Widespread Policy Disruption: Terrorism, Public Risks, and Homeland Security

We address theoretical and empirical aspects of policy disruptions that affect multiple areas of policymaking. Our theorizing leads us to consider the effects of widespread disruptions in gaining the attention of elected officials, in affecting policymaking, and in reshaping the involvement of federal agencies. Our empirical analyses concern the threat of terrorism in the United States and its implications for public risk subsystems over the past 25 years. Our analyses of the attention of policymakers and resultant policymaking volatility show selective patterns of subsystem disruption related to the threat of terrorism. We show that capturing the attention of policymakers in multiple subsystems is insufficient to motivate heightened levels of policymaking across the board. In addition, we find more muted impacts for federal agency involvement than might have been expected from the massive reorganization that created the Department of Homeland Security. More generally, the disjunctions we observe show the powerful influence of policy subsystems in buffering against widespread policy disruptions.     

When Do We “Just Say No”? Policy Termination Decisions in Local Hospital Services

This paper develops a two‐stage decision‐making model of the public policy termination process, which integrates political and economic influences on local decision makers. We empirically explore the model using data on the provision of local public hospitals in California over 1981–95. The results provide support for the model as we find that triggering events as well as characteristics of the local decision‐making context affect the termination decision. For the case of public hospitals, we find that lower state and local revenue growth rates increase the likelihood of termination, while decision makers in communities with a larger local health budget, more unionized public employees, and a larger private hospital sector are less likely to terminate local public hospitals. The implications for public policy and for our understanding of the termination process are discussed.